Poverty in Romani settlements to become a tourist attraction in Slovakia

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Speculation has been circulating for some time that tourism in Slovakia could be developed around organizing visits to Romani settlements.

Now Petr Duda, Mayor of Veµká Lomnice, a village in the Tatra mountains, is planning to turn local Romani settlements into a kind of tourist destination and attraction and his doing his best to push the plan through in the nearby settlement of Nový Dvùr, where 1,600 people are eking out a living in abject poverty in total substandard conditions, without clean water or sewerage.

“This would be an organized tour of the Romani settlements here in Veµká Lomnice,” Duda explained to the Czech Radio news server Rozhlas.cz. “The reason is to get people to realize what kinds of conditions Romani people live in here. On the other hand, it could motivate the Romani people to improve their living conditions on their own.”

In other words, they are doing this in order to shame the Romani residents in those areas who also may not have the means to improve their living conditions. Therefore, instead of helping them to help themselves the Romani People in those areas are now being turned into a circus attraction by idiotic politicians.

I guess that the mayor is trying to find a way of making money from the misery of the Romani residents in the area and the problem is that there will be enough idiotic tourists, especially from abroad, that would want to visit such Third World conditions in an EU member state in the same way that they would travel to places in the Third World for the very same reason.

The most important question that we must ask, I am sure, is what eh European Union and the European Commission are doing about this idea? Are they going to make any attempt to put a stop to such exploitation of the conditions of an entire people?